The present disclosure relates generally to distributing supplies, and more particularly to heuristic cross shipping of disaster relief supplies at points of distribution. When disasters occur (e.g., such as hurricane, earthquake, fire, bioterrorism, and others), emergency supplies (e.g., water, meal, medicine, generators, blankets, tarps, and others) need to be distributed to victims on time. The distribution operations in those situations (e.g., supply chain and dispensing) are unique because the operations need to cover a large number of people (e.g., million of victims) in a short period of time (e.g., a small number of hours or days) under undesirable conditions for supply chain operation (chaos, damaged and/or congested roadways, behavior of victims, progression of disasters, many unknowns and uncertainties, serious consequences of ineffective distribution plan, death, sickness, social disorder, and others). It is usually a one time event of short duration with limited opportunity for re-planning of upper level supply chain.
Thus, the supply chain of the relief supplies differs from commercial supply chains in many ways because the following factors need to be taken into account when planning the supply chain of the relief supplies: a huge surge of demand with a short notice, damaged and congested roadways, chaotic behavior of demand and victims, breakdown of infrastructure such as communication networks, short lead times, and other unknowns and uncertainties. Preparing for a large disaster is difficult because predicting with accuracy where and when it will strike is practically infeasible.
Shipment of emergency supplies from supply staging areas (SSA) to point of distributions (PODs) is typically carried out on round-robin fashion (i.e., one POD after another in a predetermined order) with no cross shipping among PODs. However, due to the above-described uncertainties and variability of demand at different PODs and also because of the limited supply, imbalance between demand and supply may occur among the PODs. That is, some PODs may be left with a surplus while other PODs may have a shortage.